You really expect to SEO for real estate with an I-framed website?

It is hard enough trying to SEO for “(name of city) real estate” due to Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, Redfin, Movoto, ZipRealty and homes.aol taking up most of the page one organics.

Maybe you are doing everything right. You have a domain that you own and a webisite that may have been provided by your franchise, broker or a third-party real estate marketing company. You are creating content every week with blogging, adding longtail sub-communities, buyer/seller tips, RSS feeds, social media and an IDX.

When you look at your site, everything looks normal to the viewer but what if most of the content of your website is invisible to the search engines? You can actually run a Google search on your domain to see how many pages have actually been indexed. You might be surprised.

Today a prospect had me look at their site. The IDX was being fed by Wolfnet. There were some components fed by Brandco. However, when I would look at the page source of ANY page, all I saw was 17 lines of html with <iframe> code. My first clue was the fact the URL never changed when I went to other internal links on the site.

You wont get unique URLs because the page isn’t changing and the URL that it is on has no actual content and therefore no SEO value. Unique URLs can be searched on and have value of their own especially when using semantic URL names (permalink structure). So essentially this prospect’s pages have no SEO value.

iFramed sites cannot be crawled the same as hard coded page content. This is damaging to the real estate web site if the information users are looking for is contained within an iframe. Though the user can see the content, it is likely that it will not be crawled. This means that keyword-rich content within an iframe cannot help your site ranking. If you are using iframe to display the content on your web pages, it will be much harder to rank in the search engines.

Web spiders may be able to enter an iframe but once they have begun crawling the iframe they may not exit the iframe to crawl the rest of the site. This means that even though there are other pages on your site, that they might not be indexed. This could result in a fewer pages being indexed by the search engines.

If you hover over a link on the site you are looking at, in the lower left corner of the browser window you may be able to see the url your site is actually pulling data from. In this case, when I hovered over a blog link, I could see the blog was installed in a sub-domain rather then the preferred sub-directory(for SEO value of the primary domian. This will be discussed in a future post.

I also noticed the IDX was I-Framed as well which brings up a whole other issue I will address soon about allowing the search engines to index the MLS through your suite as if you owned the MLS.

If you want me to review your website, please fill out the contact form on the right.